Santiago

Santiago is our IT guy down here, and he seems pretty good at what he does.  He also is certified as an Air Traffic Controller and loves airplanes, so we hit off right from the start.  In the photo above, he is on the right, his girlfriend (and IT assistant) Diana, and my main man Gonzalo on the left.  As a side job, he is a flight simulator technician, so he runs the simulators for pilots to train in.  There's a small airport near us that, as Santiago explains, has a cliff at both ends of the runway.  So you drop in between the mountains, on a steep descent, maintain enough lift so that you don't fall out of the sky, but also need to ensure that you don't have too much thrust that would propel off the end of the runway.  I'm reminded of the way baby birds learn to fly by falling out of the nest and hoping to instantly learn flight, but I'm no bird watcher, so I could be making that up.

Santiago is one of the better English speaking Colombians around.  While explaining something that has gone wrong, he likes to end off the sentence by pushing his head down towards the ground and yelling "WHADAFAK!"

So far he has been a great help to me, with both his tech support and his English.  He also seems to be pretty good friends with Yolima and Gonzalo, which works out well, especially when I get tongue tied in Spanish.  The other day, the three of them took Wes and I out to a restaurant called Hatoviejo for Wes' last day.  There was a delicious smell of Alder wood (which I just now connected with the name for the small area in Etobicoke!) when we walked in, and the decor was equally impressive.  We were greeted by a caballero in cowboy gear, so I figured this place was going to have some great food.  I ordered El Churrasco, which they described in English as Argentinian style beef.  Basically a barbecued steak, but to perfection.  I felt kind of bad not ordering Bandeja Paisa, the true Colombian dish that Santiago had been promoting, but it read as though it was massive and contained a lot of rice and beans.  I've got nothing particularly against either of them, but I didn't believe that I could finish the whole thing, which I'm constantly worried about.  So why not simply order a massive slab of beef, right?  As an appetizer they brought out some delectable guacamole, which one would either spread on los patacones (best plantains I've ever eaten), or la arepa, basically a thick, small pancake made out of cornmeal.

Maybe I should have dedicated this post to food and not to Santi...oh well.

You may have noticed the ingenious way they serve beer in the photo above.  It's a cylinder (that oddly reminds me of my wedding night...) with a tap at the bottom, so you just keep pouring from there.  I think they said it holds 10 beers.  It also takes up very little space on the table and keeps your beer pretty cold.